Hypnotic Portraits of Male Dancers in Motion

Former military photographer Nir Arieli — an artist we discovered on Lost at E Minor — left the battlefields to focus on the dance world. The men and women he encountered helped develop his approach to portraiture today. “I saw combat fighters with the most fragile souls… I look for the sensitivity and gentleness in each of my subjects,” the artist said in an interview with Kaltblut Magazine.

Arieli chooses male dancers as his subjects, capturing their grace and strength during physically challenging movements, which Arieli believes “exposes the dancer in their most vulnerable state.”

The series Tension — hypnotic portraits of dancers’ tangled limbs and overlapping bodies — expresses “desire, admiration, and attraction” for Arieli. “In women there’s something that I feel like is not accessible to me, and it might be because of my sexual identity,” he admits. “There is a tension that is required to make every moment of the portrait happen, and that’s also the name of this project.” See more of Arieli’s beautiful dancers in our gallery.